Rand Paul's principled stumble

Rand Paul has taken a principled — but politically incorrect — position, for which he’s being pilloried. A look behind the 6-second-sound-bite version of his position might be helpful.

Despite how his comments have played, Paul has said he is glad that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. He accepts the Civil Rights Act as settled U.S. law — not to be revisited by the courts despite possible constitutional infirmities.

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But, though the Supreme Court upheld the 1964 act, the law has a disputable constitutional pedigree. The Civil Rights Act addresses the conduct of private individuals, so it is not easily shoehorned into the 14th Amendment, which constrains only government conduct. And the act has nothing to do with reducing state-imposed obstacles to the free flow of interstate trade — so it should not have been legitimized under an original understanding of the commerce clause.

Still, the law was affirmed — and deservedly so — by the court because it helped erase an unconscionable assault on human dignity.

So Paul stands foursquare for civil rights but acknowledges the Civil Rights Act’s possible disconnect from the Constitution. His position is therefore intellectually honest, unlike those who insist that, because the Civil Rights Act is beneficent, it must necessarily be constitutional.

Some activities — for example, torture — offend the Constitution even though they might yield widely acclaimed benefits — such as preventing a terrorist attack.

The remedy in such cases is either to amend the Constitution or to acknowledge the disconnect and recognize that the Constitution must not be a barrier to racial equality.

Paul’s detractors misunderstand the essential nature and purpose of our Constitution. It does not speak to private power; it is not a criminal or civil code that private citizens must obey.

Rather, the Constitution has two primary objectives: to authorize government, then limit its powers in a manner that secures individual rights.

First and foremost, the Constitution is a code of conduct for the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. Both federal and state officials breached that code when they condoned slavery and, later, Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation.

Of course, the media have used Paul’s forthright if impolitic pronouncement as an occasion to disparage his libertarian — that is, classic liberal — philosophy. Not surprisingly, critics either do not understand or willfully distort basic libertarian principles. For starters, libertarians are proponents of limited government. We are not anarchists.